Councillor Fothergill and Mayor Marvin Rees on the connection between employment and health in creating pathways to good jobs
Local government’s ambition is to enable everyone to achieve their potential for a healthy and productive life. The connection between employment and health is pivotal to so many of us.
The evidence that unemployment is bad for your health is clear and likewise that good work is an important contributor to improved health and wellbeing outcomes across people’s lives. Ill health can also affect people’s participation in the labour market, with over 300,000 people annually falling out of work and onto health-related welfare. This has a significant cost to the individual, families, communities, employers and public services.
Work and health is central to the story of people and place. Helping people with health issues to obtain or retain work and be happy and productive within the workplace is a crucial part of the economic success and wellbeing of every community.
Evidence shows that good quality work is beneficial to an individual’s health and wellbeing and protects against social exclusion through the provision of income, social interaction, a core role, identity and purpose.
For every £1 of public spending saved, 7p goes back to the local authority, 80p goes to central Government, and 13p to police, NHS, social housing providers and others. Although these direct (ie cashable) services are primarily accrued by central Government, many of the indirect costs (and benefits) fall to local government and the extent to which the potential benefits are realisable depends on how initiatives are designed and implemented.
The potential for saving is significant, especially if people can be encouraged and diverted away from becoming dependent on welfare. Therefore, coordination between health and employment systems through a focus on supporting people with health issues to obtain or retain employment will achieve better health outcomes and economic gains. Having one extra disabled person in full-time work, rather than being out of work longer term, would mean Government could save and re-invest £15,000 a year.
However, jobs need to be sustainable and offer a minimum level of quality, to include not only a decent living wage, but also opportunities for in-work development, the flexibility to enable people to balance work and family life, and protection from adverse working conditions that can damage health.
Fundamentally, a healthy population is one that has the potential to be a healthy, resilient, and productive workforce. This is key to attracting and retaining businesses and developing dynamic and diverse communities that are sustainable for the future.
There is a growing awareness of the relationship between health and prosperity, with differences in health helping to explain productivity gaps between places. The recent Levelling Up policy stresses the link between people’s health, education, skills and employment prospects and focuses on policies to ensure everyone, wherever they live, can lead healthy and productive lives.
Councils have developed many innovative interventions over recent years in these areas. Such interventions help their citizens to acquire the skills and opportunities to find work that suits them, overcome barriers to work and engagement in society, and become more healthy, active and resilient.
The LGA’s Work Local model aims to give democratically elected local leaders the power and funding to work with partners to join up careers’ advice and guidance, employment, skills, apprenticeships, business support services and outreach in the community. A cost benefit analysis demonstrates it could result in a 15 per cent increase in the number of people improving their skills or finding work by using existing investment more effectively, by adult skills, contracted employment support and UKSPF, and giving local areas more influence in apprenticeships and 16-19 funding.
For a typical medium-sized combined authority, with a working age population of 960,000, around £270 million investment per year could improve employment and skills outcomes by about 15 per cent, meaning an extra 2,260 people improving their skills each year and an extra 1,650 people moving into work. Taking account of wider benefits such as health and wellbeing could more than triple the economic benefits, up to £87 million per year.
Part of supporting people to achieve their potential in life is looking at how to enable them to enter the job market and maintain economic independence for themselves and their families, especially as they age. This is especially important for individuals with long term conditions and disabilities where the difference in employment rate between people with disabilities and the general population is unacceptably large and misrepresents the large number of people in this group who want to work and live independent lives.
Creating pathways to good jobs requires partners from across the private, public and third sector to work together, especially for those who are living with long term conditions or disabilities. Local government leadership is key to bringing these partners together and, of course, through leading by example within their workforce.
Councillor David Fothergill Chair, LGA Community Wellbeing Board
Mayor Marvin Rees, Chair, LGA City and Regions Board